Black Friday 2025: the season AI became a shopping channel

Black Friday 2025 broke records again, but the headline number is not the most interesting one. The bigger shift happened before the checkout: more shoppers started their search inside an AI assistant rather than a search box or a social feed.

In brief: In 2025 AI assistants became a shopping channel. US shoppers spent $11.8 billion online on Black Friday, up 9.1%, says Adobe. Holiday traffic from generative AI tools to US retail sites rose 693.4% from a modest base (Adobe), and AI search referrals converted nine times more often than social media referrals (Salesforce).

A record week, driven online

According to Adobe Analytics, US consumers spent $11.8 billion online on Black Friday, up 9.1% year over year, and $14.25 billion on Cyber Monday, up 7.1%. For the second season running, Black Friday grew faster than Cyber Monday as shoppers moved on earlier deals (Adobe, 2 Dec 2025).

Mastercard SpendingPulse, which measures in-store and online sales across all payment types, saw the same direction from another angle: US retail sales excluding autos rose 4.1% on Black Friday, with e-commerce up 10.4% and in-store sales up 1.7%. Those figures are not adjusted for inflation (Mastercard, 29 Nov 2025).

AI assistants became a front door

Adobe counts a visit as AI traffic when a shopper clicks a link to a retail site from inside a generative AI tool. Across the holiday season, from 1 November to 31 December 2025, that traffic rose 693.4% year over year, and on Cyber Monday alone it rose 670%. Adobe is careful to add that the base of users remains modest. AI assistance was used most for video games, toys, appliances, electronics and personal care (Adobe, 7 Jan 2026).

Salesforce, which reads commerce activity across its own platform, describes the same pattern from the retailer side. For Cyber Week (25 November to 1 December) it counted $336.6 billion in global online sales, up 7%, and estimated that AI and agents influenced 20% of global orders, worth $67 billion, through product recommendations and conversational service (Salesforce, 5 Dec 2025).

Over the full season, Salesforce reported that the share of traffic arriving from third-party AI search channels such as ChatGPT and Perplexity doubled compared with the previous year, and that shoppers referred from those channels converted nine times more often than shoppers referred from social media (Salesforce, 8 Jan 2026).

Agents moved into service, too

The AI story did not stop at discovery. Salesforce reported that agentic customer service conversations grew 55% week over week during Cyber Week, and that agent actions such as updating delivery addresses and starting returns rose 70% on the previous week (Salesforce, 5 Dec 2025). For many shoppers, the first conversation after the purchase was also with an AI.

What it means for marketers

Three practical conclusions follow, with one caution: these are vendor datasets with different scopes. Adobe measures US e-commerce, Salesforce measures activity on its own global platform, and the numbers should not be added together.

• Treat AI referrals as a channel. Break out traffic from AI assistants in analytics, and track its conversion and basket size separately from organic search and social.
• Make the brand legible to machines. An assistant can only recommend what it can read. Clean product data, clear positioning and consistent claims across the web matter more when the first answer is written by a model.
• Plan for the season, not the day. With deals starting earlier and Black Friday outgrowing Cyber Monday, the AI-assisted research phase begins weeks before the peak.

Discounts still did much of the heavy lifting, as Adobe's season recap notes (Adobe, 7 Jan 2026). But the shoppers who arrived through an AI answer came with their minds more made up. That makes the moment before the click the one to win.

Frequently asked questions

How much did US shoppers spend online on Black Friday 2025?

According to Adobe Analytics, US consumers spent $11.8 billion online on Black Friday 2025, up 9.1% year over year, and $14.25 billion on Cyber Monday, up 7.1%. Mastercard SpendingPulse reported US retail sales excluding autos up 4.1% on Black Friday, with e-commerce up 10.4% and in-store sales up 1.7%, not adjusted for inflation.

How much traffic did AI assistants send to retailers in the 2025 holiday season?

Adobe counts a visit as AI traffic when a shopper clicks through to a retail site from inside a generative AI tool. From 1 November to 31 December 2025, that traffic to US retail sites rose 693.4% year over year, according to Adobe, which adds that the base of users remains modest. AI assistance was used most for video games, toys, appliances, electronics and personal care.

Do shoppers referred by AI search convert better than shoppers from social media?

On Salesforce's data, yes. Over the 2025 holiday season, the share of traffic from third-party AI search channels such as ChatGPT and Perplexity doubled, and those shoppers converted nine times more often than shoppers referred from social media, according to Salesforce. For Cyber Week, Salesforce estimated that AI and agents influenced 20% of global orders, worth $67 billion.